The Book of Sleep

Forget space, or the dark depths of the oceans: the true unexplored human frontier is the third of our lives we spend suspended in the strange netherworld of sleep. For all the talk of dreams, how little has been written of those hours! This slim book, by an Egyptian writer who lives in Berlin, grants that world its inaccessibility—the "neglected excess that everyone knows about and no one speaks of"—but speaks of it nevertheless, in lovely, exact, mind-broadening philosophical vignettes that make it one of my favorite discoveries of the year, and the one I'm likely to keep by my bedside for years to come.